EXHIBITION ON VIEW: June 14 - July 20, 2024

OPENING RECEPTION (with artist remarks): FRIDAY, June 21; 6:30 - 9 PM

Please join Highpoint Center for Printmaking in celebrating the 2023-2024 Jerome Early Career Printmakers at their culminating exhibition. Artists Mei Lam So, Izzy Shinn, and Gidinatiy Hartman will present a new work created during their residency, including a collection of intaglio, relief, and lithographic prints. 

Mei, Gidinatiy, and Izzy each investigate identity and personal experience through their distinctive styles of figuration. The work is remarkable, thoughtfully imaginative, and skillfully executed. 

Fundamentally, a print is an image transferred from a matrix onto a substrate, and in that sense, much of the work featured in this exhibition employs traditional printmaking techniques. However, this work was not made without risk and discovery – Gidinaitiy learned stone lithography, arguably one of the most challenging printmaking techniques, Mei eschewed the customary copper or zinc plate in favor of a material called Cintra for her series of drypoint prints, and Izzy incorporated carefully cut, colored paper additions into their intaglio prints.

Read on to learn more about each artist and their work:

Mei Lam So 

Mei is excited to share a new series of work that represents a directional change in both style and technique. While drypoint is not new to Mei, this series she presents utilizes a different material as the matrix. By incorporating monotype layers into the background, Mei’s work features a dynamic application of color, directing the viewer’s attention throughout the print. Mei will also showcase lithography, ceramics, and a print installation in the exhibition. Mei says the residency, especially the past few months, “have gone by fast. I’ve gained valuable feedback from co-op members through community critiques and short catch-ups in the studio and have incorporated them into my practice.”

Mei Lam So (she/her) is a Minneapolis-based visual artist whose medium includes printmaking, textile printing, and ceramics. She received her MFA in Printmaking and Ceramics from the University of Iowa and her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Originally from Hong Kong, Mei examines the acculturation process of bicultural Asian immigrants, covering topics such as memory, identity, separation, and time. 

Izzy Shinn 

Izzy has been busy finishing prints while simultaneously fleshing out the concepts behind their work. Izzy said that throughout the residency, they often found themself occupied with ideating, planning, and potential, “I've been keeping to what I know concerning printing technique and processes, but utilizing that knowledge to the best of my ability, especially amongst such amazing resources and community found at Highpoint." 

Izzy Shinn (they/he/she) is a butch Twin Cities-based printmaker and comic artist specializing in intaglio etching and ink illustration, having earned their BFA from the University of Minnesota. With a focus on butchness, lesbian life, and history, their work is tied intimately with themself and their own experiences, showcased through characters and archetypes, exploring the sexual and social stigmatization of women, the body, and the queer subject.

Gidinatiy Hartman
Gidinatiy will be presenting multi-block color relief prints that depict words from Deg Xinag (their Native language), including images from an ongoing series of “bug prints”. In another work, Gidinatiy recreates the visual effect of Athabascan beadwork by meticulously carving hundreds upon hundreds of individual dots onto a linoleum block. The effect is incredible, and it needs to be seen firsthand.

Gidinatiy Hartman (they/them) has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Their artwork creates visual representations of Deg Xinag and other Native languages. It is centered around a desire to reclaim their family’s Athabascan language, which was taken from them due to colonization. United by a sense of whimsy and wordplay, their art seeks to make it easier for people to learn Deg Xinag and other Native languages. They aspire to have multiple modes of representation, including visual art, making language revitalization more accessible to people.

About the Jerome Early Career Printmakers Residency – Highpoint’s Jerome Residency was established in 2003 with generous funding from the Jerome Foundation. The program serves early-career Minnesota printmakers who show significant potential yet have not received a commensurate amount of professional accomplishment or recognition in the field. Jerome artists are selected based on their dedication, interest, and potential in printmaking, as well as the artistic merit of their work.

Highpoint would like to thank this year’s panelists Tamara Aupumaut and Heidi Goldberg.

Tamara Aupaumut is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator living on Mni Sota Makoce, also known as Minneapolis. She works in a variety of media, including printmaking.

Heidi Goldberg earned her BA from Hamline University and MFA in printmaking and works on paper at The University of Michigan. She taught studio art at Concordia from 1995-2022. Her works have been exhibited in local, regional, national, and international juried exhibitions. She lives and works in the sand hills near the National Sheyenne Grasslands in North Dakota. 

Special thanks to guest critics Suyao Tian, Regan Golden McNerney, Tamara Aupaumat, and Hedi Goldberg for visiting with the artist and providing feedback at various intervals during the residency.

The Jerome Early Career Residency is in its 21st year of programming and is funded with a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation. The program is open to early-career Minnesota printmakers — defined here as artists who show significant potential yet have not received a commensurate amount of professional accomplishment or recognition, regardless of age or recognition in other fields. You can find details about the program, application process, and creative benefits on our website.

About the Jerome Foundation –  Created by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill (1905-1972), The Jerome Foundation seeks to contribute to a dynamic and evolving culture by supporting the creation, development, and production of new works by emerging artists. Based in St. Paul, MN, the Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit arts organizations and artists in Minnesota and New York City.

Exhibition opening reception: friday, June 9; 6:30-9pm

Artist remarks at 7pm

Exhibition on view through July 22

Please join us at Highpoint for the culminating exhibition of the 2022- 2023 Jerome Early Career Printmakers. Through the generous support of the Jerome Foundation, resident artists Brandon Chambers, Brian Wagner, and Nicole Soley have been working industriously toward this exhibition since their residency began in September of 2022.

The nine-month residency provided the artists with access to the Highpoint cooperative printshop, technical support, and professional opportunities to create, learn, and show new work within a supportive studio environment. The exhibition includes images created using foundational printmaking techniques such as lithography and woodcut but also features less conventional print work like stop motion animation and transfer monotypes made with alcohol-based ink. The common thread binding the work of these three artists is the significance of thought informing it. The exhibition is conceptually charged; the founding thoughts, ideas, and feelings are poetically expressed through figures, text, scenes, and material.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND WORK:

Brian Wagner (they/them) was educated at the University of Minnesota Moorhead and shortly thereafter completed the professional printer program at the Tamarind Institute of Fine Art Lithography in Albuquerque. They draw upon their experience of growing up as a queer person in rural America and how that has been formative to their sexuality, identity, and transness as a non-binary individual.

I have spent this residency rendering densely-layered lithographs that explore the tenderness, loneliness, acceptance, and gentle anger of queerness and healing. These prints and writings consider the physical and emotional spaces of love, hurt, trauma, and remembrance of relationships in the forms of drawn landscapes and queer symbolism of the day-to-day life of a queer person. I view many of the scenes I draw as places of transition; shifting and ever-changing. Something that is cohesive with my own queerness. I spent most of this residency fighting the healing that was needed of me –– I think it’s easy for queer people to get used to resilience and ignore the trauma that we face every day, even from our own community and partners. In the laborious nature of lithography, I think it was only natural to have a bit of a breakdown and face the physical and emotional trauma that was being echoed and start to heal and it’s my hope that these spaces can offer solace to someone who has faced the same. – Brian Wagner

Nicole Soley (she/her) is an area artist and educator who studied at Minnesota State University Mankato. Using a novel approach along with a touch of sardonicism, Nicole’s traditional and sculptural prints tell stories that critique the culture of ‘American Dissonance’ we are collectively living in. She synthesizes lived experience and research to comment on education, gun culture, individual freedoms, and the harrowing upholding of the patriarchy.

​​Contemporary strife has moved me to create in order to process, distribute, and hopefully motivate political organizations to cause change. My personal experiences this year heavily influenced the trajectory of this work in newer experimental directions. I think that’s where the best art lives, though: in the fluidity and uncertainty of the human experience, propagating and releasing new truths to orbit an ever-moving molten core. Thank god for woodcut printmaking: carving was possibly the only gravity I felt while I was both lost and searching, grasping and letting go, disillusioned and fully standing in my own truth. – Nicole Soley

Brandon Chambers (he/him) completed his MFA at the University of Minnesota in 2021. A multidisciplinary artist, Brandon’s current research is into virtual reality as both a philosophical concept and a creative tool. His recent works employ geometry and grids to illustrate systems and visually establish a sense of clarity about the world. He states, “I am interested in merging nostalgia for the distant past with fantasies of the distant future as a way of conceptualizing the present.”

Semantic satiation is a phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to lose meaning for the listener. It becomes a meaningless sound. I wonder at the routines and archetypes we are inundated with throughout our lives. Was there an idea so important that it was repeated and repeated and repeated until it was lost?” His response as an artist is seen in the lithographs, monotypes, and drawings that contemplate this question. – Brandon Chambers

Highpoint would like to thank our panelists Jovan Speller and Jeremy Lundquist for their intensive review and evaluation of the submitted applications as well as the Jerome Foundation for their continued support of this important program. As well as Ruthann Godollei and Nancy Julia Hicks for visiting with the residents to conduct in-progress critiques.

About the panelists: 

Jovan C. Speller is a Minnesota-based artist originally from Los Angeles.  Her work interprets historic narratives through contemporary discourse. Her research-based practice is centered around elevating, complicating and inventing stories that explore ancestry, identity, and spatial memory. Speller is a recipient of a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship and a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. She completed a residency at Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul, and was awarded the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize in 2021. She holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, and studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Speller's work has been acquired by national and international private collections and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Jeremy Lundquist was born in California, grew up in the Chicago area, and currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. He works in print, drawing, photography, video, installation, and cut and collaged paper. He has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow, Harold Arts, Spudnik Press, Kala Art Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been awarded the Grant Wood, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships. His work has been exhibited at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Chicago Cultural Center, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois – Chicago, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and additional venues nationally and internationally. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Currently he teaches at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, an arts high school run by the state of Minnesota.

Grace Sippy, Benjamin Merritt, Karmel Sabri

On View: September 14 - October 10

In August 2019, invited jurors Keisha Williams (Contemporary Art Department Curatorial Assistant and Artist Liaison, Minneapolis Institute of Art) and Bryan Ritchie (Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin-Stout) selected Karmel Sabri, Benjamin Merritt, and Grace Sippy as the 2019-2020 Jerome Emerging Printmakers. This was our offering the program funded by a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation. The residency is open to emerging Minnesota printmakers — defined here as artists who show significant potential, yet have not received a commensurate amount of professional accomplishment or recognition regardless of age or recognition in other fields.

The residency was running along smoothly until the middle of March when the pandemic abruptly forced Highpoint to close. The unexpected closure lasted until July and the Residency exhibition had to be postponed. The good news is that the Jerome Emerging Printmakers Exhibition will be Highpoint’s first public exhibition since we shut down in March. The exhibition will be on view beginning Monday, September 14 and will run through October 10.

Here’s what you can expect to see from the artists:

Benjamin has created a body of work that originates from a love of language and a need to communicate what living with a chronic illness entails. He uses the etching processes to reflect on the continually changing nature of chronic illness. Benjamin is able to scrape, manipulate, scar, and erase on the copper, leaving a collection of marks in the resulting printed image that reveal the history of the plate. He also implements monoprinting techniques in much of the work, creating a play between the stagnant, repeated etching and the fluid monoprint. 

More recently, through the COVID-19 pandemic, his thinking about the role of care in our society has manifested in his work. His personal relationship to care is that which he receives in treatment for a chronic illness, as well as his own employment in the care industry. Similarly to the work about chronic illness, he is interested in highlighting how complicated and multifaceted care can be, the importance and necessity of understanding the subtleties of healthcare that are often overlooked in America.

During this challenging and unstable year, Karmel pushed her aesthetic boundaries by playing with color and texture while channeling printmaking and embroidery into a therapeutic method of expressing the pain and frustration of intimate generational and personal traumas. The title of this body of work “The Question of Palestine” relates geopolitical relations between the US, Palestine, and Israel to personal experiences. Layering legal documents, personal stories, and found materials with bold colors and sharp, organic gestures, Karmel connects themes of resistance and resilience. 

Grace developed a large series of simultaneously delicate and weighty figurative studies that she turned into photolithographs and screenprints. The lightweight, translucent paper they are printed on further enhances their aura of fragility. Grace uses the figure to explore what cannot be said, or what she does not wish to say through words, and regularly visits themes of disintegration, doubles, the Grotesque, vulnerability, and conflict. Grace's creative methodology begins with photography; using herself or her husband as a model. She makes sketches from the photographs and then toner drawings (on mylar) based off the sketches. The toner drawings are used as films to make screens and photolithographic plates, from which prints are finally made. She will be exhibiting these finalized prints, and possibly some of the toner drawings they are made from.

In November Bryan Ritchie visited Highpoint and Dyani White Hawk was here at the beginning of January to conduct in-progress critiques with the residents. Tricia Heuring joined the residents for another critique at the end of February and in August, Keisha Williams met with the Residents to advise them on the layout of their exhibition.